| Subject: |
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What is the opposite of globalisation? |
| Name: |
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Wim van Binsbergen |
| Date Posted: |
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Feb 9, 05 - 1:14 PM |
| Email: |
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binsbergen@fsw.leidenuniv.nl |
| Message: |
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Dear Dr Kandagor
Thank you for your kind words about our book Situating Globality; African Agency in the Appropriation of Global Culture (Leiden: Brill 2004; Wim van Binsbergen & Rijk van Dijk, eds.). You are right that it is a book in which Africa, and Africans, are put in the centre, perhaps more than is usual in books about globalisation. We were lucky in that we could count, among the contributors, African colleagues who particularly helped us understand and appreciate what globalisation can be from an African perspective: not only increased marginalisation, but also increased participation, and particularly the invitation to creatively take from whatever is available on a global scale, that which suits regional and local African interests today.
You ask me to state in one paragraph what, in my opinion, is the opposite of globalisation. I am not sure if there is an opposite. What, for instance, is the opposite of air? of length? of time? Not all aspects of our experience, and not all concepts, have an obvious opposite. However, posing the question greatly helps to articulate what we really mean by globalisation. If globalisation is the process through which, by enhanced technologies of communication, local settings are more and more open to world-wide influences of any kind (demographic, productive, technological, artistic, religious, social organisational), there hardly could be a true opposite to globalisation, for given the spherical shape of the earth, and given mankind's (especially Anatomicaly Modern Mankind's) perennial tendency to be on the move, globalisation is in principle of all times -- although today's enhanced globalisation, with unprecedented levels of information and communication made possible by technologies that only became available in the course of the 20th century CE, makes a difference so great that it is one not just in degree but also in kind. Certainly, the opposite of globalisation is not localisation, for the retreat within new boundaries of identity and avoidance (like in today's fundamentalisms in Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism; or in the myriad new identities that form around chatrooms and in discussion groups at the Internet, as well as in new lifestyles, musical styles, fashion styles etc.), the overall globalisation is simply the context to which the retreat is a response -- localisation is an aspect, not the opposite, of globalisation (hence the expression glocalisation). If globalisation is to have an opposite, I would situate that opposite in the type of historical process in which earlier, high levels of interlocal communication and organisation were supplanted by significantly lower levels: fragmentation, in other words, of state systems, systems of knowledge, systems of communication (such as languages and religious forms), shared cultural systems. While the rise of statehood in the Ancient Near East from c. 3100 BCE to its culmination in the Roman Empire was an example of (proto-)globalisation, it was followed, from the fourth century CE onwards, by significant levels of fragmentation, where Roman (Western as well as Byzantine) statehood, and patterns of military, bureaucratic, judicial etc. organisation, desintegrated, not so much into entrenched boundedness of articulate identities, but into local, at best regional, communities with a relatively low degree of interlocal organisation, and little awareness of translocal identities and identifications. Soon the rise of Islam, and the spread and consolidation of Christianity in Western and Northern Europe, turned this Age of Chaos into new forms of proto-globalisation. In Africa the same pendulum swing between higher and lower level of interlocal organisation can be seen, when extensive state systems (e.g. in the Mali and Ghana empires, Zimbabwe, etc.) repeatedly gave way to more diffuse and localised communities with a much narrower horizon, again to be opened up to larger state systems with the rise of new African states and empires (Torwa, Lunda, Kazembe, Bemba), the penetration of Islam, the advent of European commerce and statehood, and the vicissitudes of the colonial and postcolonial states. In this respect the decline of the postcolonial state in several African countries seems to be another form of such fragmentation, which however goes hand in hand with the penetration of other forms of organisation on the wings of globalisation: the international commodity trade, arms trade, intercontinental brain drain, alliance between African elites and North Atlantic regimes, and the general penetration of North Atlantic models of life style, consumption and values including modern communication media which in themselves are vehicles enhancing further levels of such penetration.
A long paragraph, I hope it answers your question.
With kindest regards
wim van binsbergen |
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